Description: Was Pablo Picasso a modern Midas, who not only turned the trash of everyday life into the gold of cubist collage but, touching all of old-master art, gave it fabulous new value? Or was he a monster counterfeiter who mercilessly raided the styles of others? This fascinating new look at one of the greatest artists of the century, by one of the foremost theorists of modern art, suggests that if these questions are still necessary about Picasso, it is because modernism itself may be a hall of mirrors in which counterfeit and genuine are not opposites but, instead, two sides of the same condition. Revealing Picasso's collage as a vertiginous play of voices, The Picasso Papers shows that no single voice is "authentic" or sanctioned by its author. Picasso's pastiche of other artists, however, is brilliantly brought into focus as the "sublimated" underbelly of cubism itself, now rewritten in the bright, clean style of the master's neoclassicism.

Please Wait